Chapter Two

The Voyage of the Odysseus


I reported to the space elevator at 0615 Tetris, 10924.534CE. After presenting my identifier the 'vator clerk gave me a mocking salute.

"Non-uniformed personnel are not entitled to a salute," I said, my tone no doubt a bit stiff. I was young then, and the creche was quite strict on matters of protocol.

"Dumb crechie," he muttered to my back.

I took a seat, fastened the restraint systems as directed by the 'vator attendant, endured the seemingly interminable delay until the unit received processor-mediated clearance. A chime, a robotic announcement and with an almost imperceptible sensation the 'vator compartment began the long lift out of Chantilly's modest gravity well. Four hours later the compartment came to a rest and the passengers, some twenty-three of us, entered the Lagrange 1 Point Waystation, then waited in the lounge, eating and making small talk, until the various shuttles announced their availability. After forty minutes only two of us were left in the lounge, a girl from my creche, Alistare penThommasson, who was trained to work in the ship's medical section and myself. We had seen little of each other over the years and were, for all intents, strangers.

The active-matrix environment announced, "Pinnace Roxanne is now available for boarding to System Ship Odysseus. Please have your boarding orders on-screen for scanning."

Alistare and I walked to the pressure lock, cycled through, showing our identifiers for scanning as we passed. The outer lock door cycled and we walked into the shuttle, bound for our first space assignment.


The Odysseus was a constant-thrust-type general freighter, usually called a 'schooner', forever orbiting about the various stars, planets and space colonies within the central parsec of Sagittarius A. The ship was eternally in motion, its various pinnaces, barqs, and brigantines rendezvousing with each destination. Cargo and personnel came and went via these smaller, impulse-powered craft, while the mother-ship itself looped about the star and its planets on its way through the local system. Since the schooner-type ships never changed velocities by more than a few percent, they were economical to operate for the long time/distance-spans involved in trans-stellar commerce.

The ship also carried factory modules which produced auto-miners and other equipment to harvest raw materials from various astronomical bodies, terraform suitable planets and for sale to others. An asteroid miner, for example, might be sent into orbit in an asteroid belt and left to operate for decades, accumulating sufficient refined materials to make an economical shipment when the next schooner or shorter-range vessel came calling. In essence, the Odysseus was a space colony itself, although personnel came and went more frequently than any colony ship could manage.

Each ship was owned and operated by one of the Great Houses of Trade, such as the House of penDragon. As a direct descendant of a penDragon I was expected to either work in planetary operations or take to one of the ships. At the age of six, as I have said, I was sent to the Spacer Academy, so my destiny was to join the fleet of ships ruled by my House. Since there are, by now, thousands of penDragon descendants, most of the personnel are, in some distant way, family. The economics of star-commerce is complicated and terribly risky. A shipment can take generations to reach its destination. How can a merchant know what cargo will be profitable in such-and-such a place at the time the ship finally arrives? Perhaps in the ensuing years the cargo is superfluous or outmoded, or the material is no longer worth its original value. How could a merchant actually make money in such an environment, where the transactions could take place over generations?

The answer was the eventual development of the Great Trading Houses, who, bit by bit, explored, established and maintained the trade routes of the galaxy, spreading outward in all directions from the old home world, Earth, and advancing, decade by decade, century by century, moving and adapting with technologies and new materials and then contact with other cultures—the entire history of the home world played out over parsecs of space instead of leagues of ocean and wilderness—yet much the same process. The distances, and the time-dilation effects of faster and faster ships, caused the expansion of the Empire to take many centuries.

Granted, empire was perhaps a bit grandiose a term, given the communications delays involved. Over all this time the eternal corporate body of the trade houses, descendants of the multinational corporations of ancient Earth, survived and grew, keepers of a vast storehouse of knowledge, tradition and organization. These entities are corporations, they live forever if managed properly. Certainly the science of corporate management developed and grew along with the technologies that made them powerful and rich beyond the imagination of the wealthiest capitalist robber baron of any period. Only the Houses, with their immortal lives, could plan far enough into the future to make such a difficult situation profitable. And everywhere they went they set up light-speed communications transceivers—the early quantum repeaters and now the latest coherent-quantum particle repeaters—which speeds system-to-system communications by three orders of magnitude. With this new, high speed communications, the House of penDragon, who owns the patent on the CQPR, has increased by 4.57890 percent for the average fiscal cycle (the House uses a ten PSY cycle) over the previous period.

I understood basic interstellar economics, of course, but hoped no one would recognize my skill in that area, for being a ship's purser was not my ideal of a life-time occupation. I, like many others of my genetic background, felt destined for a Captaincy, of course. All young idealists think they are capable of anything. It is only long decades of experience that teach us the truth about ourselves. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Alistare and I took our berths onboard the Roxanne. The only crew were the pilot and co-pilot, locked in their secure bridge compartment at the fore-end, or bow, of the ship. The passenger module was automated, to reduce lifesupport-systems load. Both of us were too excited to sleep for some time, so we sat in the observation dome lounge, strapped into acceleration couches to protect us from the high g thrusts the ship would require in order to accelerate to match the Odysseus' speed. This would require several days of alternate thrust applications and coasting until our orbits were matched.

Alistare watched the stars outside the clear dome. Her dark eyes seemed to reflect the black space all around us.

"We're gone for good," she said, her voice a bit wistful.

"Yes," I answered. "At last."

"I suppose you won't miss the creche, or the Academy?"

"Well, this is what I've trained for all my life, what I've studied and practiced and imagined doing. I feel as if I'm being born again." I paused, realizing her mood. "You aren't?"

"Well, sure, in the way that you say, yes." She sounded a bit defiant. "But there were some crechemates I'll miss. We'll likely never see each other again, any of us."

"Well, that's a spacer's life. 'Though I hear that many of the long-timers wind up seeing one another many times throughout the years."

"Do you think you'll be a lifer?"

"I don't know, Alis."

"I'll put in my mandatory, of course, but then I hope to work on a colony."

"You're going to deep space?" I thought she'd want a planet-side or orbiting colony assignment.

"I want to go on the Ramses."

"Intergalactic!" I was surprised and my voice rose. "You want to go all the way?"

"I think it's our destiny and I want to be a part of it."

"Talk about never seeing anyone again!"

"I'll see the same people my whole life...centuries, perhaps."

"Well, that's true."

"I want a family," she whispered. "I want to work in the gardens."

"Well, I don't really know about colony ships. Do they really have gardens?"

"They have to be self-contained, obviously. How are they going to feed people without growing it?"

"I thought it would be ship's rations."

"A colony can't live on ship's rations."

"I suppose not."

I'd lived on rations for weeks at a time without any loss of fitness. Granted, it's bland and monotonous. I suppose a lifetime of it would be intolerable. Still, I wasn't sure the mass/fuel ratio for gardens was economical for such a large spaceship. I hadn't paid much attention to the project, since I had no interest in leaving my own Galaxy to live forever in the great emptiness of intergalactic space. Even at 25%co the colonists would never live to see their destination. Many generations later, their clones might look upon a new galaxy, but whether the new brainscanners would really record your 'selfhood' was still an unsettled question. I personally wouldn't have wanted to rely on one, although eventually I settled the question for myself. But that is another story.

"Well, what is it you dream of, Ishmael?"

"I want to sail the Ocean of Stars, Alis. I want to see the Galaxy! I want to command a ship of my own, following the greatest profit, exploring new markets and resources...running the fastest, newest ship around all the arms of the Milky Way."

"Oh," she said. Her large, round, dark eyes looked disappointed, as if I had declared something infinitely sad, or a character flaw of great pettiness.

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing. I realize all the progress to date has been due to men of the House like you...Yes, Ish, I can see you as a Lord Captain, Member of the Board, forever orbiting the Galaxy on your own star-cruiser. May the Fates smile upon you."

She lifted her arm against the great pressure of acceleration to pat my arm, as if she wanted to take the sting of her earlier remarks away.

"Whatever lies ahead, we have many years ahead of us. I intend to learn as much as I can about shiplife medicine and prepare myself for the great voyage."

"Thank you for your words, Alistare penThommasson. I hope your dreams come true for you as well, whatever dreams you have in your heart."

We settled back to watch the pinnace hurtling through space, that strange sensation of barely moving, only the thrusters and nearby space objects providing points of reference. If I watched only the stars it felt as if I sat in a bubble drifting through space, with a billion colored lights gleaming bright and steady, unsullied by atmosphere and distortion.

When the acceleration-off warning chimed we unfastened our restraints and for the first time as real Spacers we floated in 0 g. Of course we had been acclimated to 0 g over our entire lives. The constant velocity ships had a kind of artificial gravity provided by the thrust of the ship's engines, but smaller ships which had to accelerate and decelerate subjected their passengers and crew to the inescapable laws of Newtonian physics. But Spacers are bred for spacelife. Weightlessness or high g acceleration does not bother us in the least.

The trip was days long. After we got over the excitement of our first mission in space, there was little for us to do but study our ship's manuals, write messages to those crechemates we cared for, sleep and eat, watch vids, play games. Much like life in the creche, I realized after the third day.

Early on the fifth day of travel the processor announced, "ETA to Odysseus - 3 PSH."

"Better get our gear packed, I guess," I said.

"I'm packed. I want to watch our approach from the lounge," she answered.

We watched, fascinated, as the schooner rose into view, growing rapidly larger and larger on the magnification screen, until soon we could see it with our own eyes, looming ever larger above us. For those who have not seen such a ship, I will describe it briefly, to orient the planet-bound to the place where I expected to spend many years of my life. Whether measured by planet years or the more accurate Einsteinian relative time, this was to be my home for a long time to come.

As I have said, the Odysseus was a constant-velocity local-system general freighter, designed to spend her entire useful life in transit, never stopping her journey. This ship was very old by fleet standards, coming up on her one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. There were a few older scows here and there, but she was one of the oldest schooners in the Dragon fleet.

Nonetheless, she functioned economically and that was the only real requirement. As long as a ship's operational costs did not exceed her profit potential she could remain in the fleet, although assignments and functions might change as time dictated. This type of ship, an inter-system nuclear-electric/solar generator freighter, could operate quite economically for centuries, as long as no other ship could operate any faster or with greater mass/fuel/thrust ratios, this type serviced its regular route, decade after decade, reliably and efficiently.

Like most space ships, the Odysseus was an open-skeleton, space-frame type, using mostly carbon-based nano-materials available at the time—light, flexible and strong. They are easy to repair with high-strength, fast-setting epoxy resins that work in vacuum and cold. She had a six-point axis design, clumsy-looking, to be sure, but in the vacuum of space, graceful lines were simply anthropomorphic eccentricities. She had a bridge compartment located on the forward axis, with the usual crew's quarters module located behind and to the right. As with all docking modules, which are standardized, this one was located on the left and just behind the bridge. Since the bridge module is spherical, observation windows are placed where necessary for visually monitoring docking procedures, still required with these older, smaller ships.

The propulsion module was the lowest axis, slung from girders that aimed the thrusters in the required direction. There were sets of thrusters on swivels, for guidance, and an entire set of identical thrusters facing exactly opposite, to help keep the vectors of the ship as close to those required as possible. Nothing wastes fuel and acceleration like maneuvering a huge ship, so all systems need to work in good synchrony to keep the ship directed on the proper course, taking advantage of gravity slings to aid in slowing or speeding up, and other gravity eddies or pools and plasma or cosmic ray streams to alter course without using engines, and fuel.

The largest module was the cargo/factory module, which was actually many smaller modules linked together as needed. There were the factory crews quarters nearby as well. Although they shared the ship's crew systems, they slept closer to work. The final module was the small environmental/crew support systems (E/CSS) module, powered from the propulsion module's fusion reactor or solar panels. Nearly every space ship is made up of these same modules, although the size and functions vary according to the ship's purpose. Additional drive modules could be added to make a faster ship, or the cargo/factory modules could be reduced to decrease mass, or that module could be eliminated and a passenger module inserted instead, along with an additional E/CSS module to sustain the additional biological load. Other specialized modules could be attached as required. The space-frame of the Odysseus bore thousands of scars where modules had been welded on or cut off and new framing and modules epoxied in place.

The final module was the large, nearly empty hanger space, where the ship's boats were docked when not in use or requiring maintenance. The Odysseus had a complement of two pinnaces, a fairly fast barq, and an old, rather battered barkentine. Only the barkentine sat in the hanger as we approached.

The ship loomed up now, filling all the space above the dome where we watched the docking procedure, as the pinnace's speed was final-matched to the mother ship and her course was locked in for the hanger. The magnetic field approach control was activated, lighting the pinnace in a blue-white fuzzy light that blotted out the view outside the dome. We could not leave our couches during docking, so we sat, basically blind in a white-out of ionized gases as we covered the final decameters and entered the hanger. As soon as the pinnace was inside the hanger the magnetic field stopped abruptly, showing us the enormous arcing ceiling overhead.

Since there were just the two crew and two passengers, the ship's dock officer did not pressurize the entire bay, but extended the pressurized umbilical for us. We saw the pilot and co-pilot for the first time when they met us at the exit hatch, an unremarkable pair of veteran spacers, pale and pudgy, as we would no doubt become in a few short years.

At the entry office the dock officer examined our identifiers one final time then offered a hand.

"Welcome to space, you creche-wienies. The Ody may be fat, slow, ugly and running on a mobios strip in space, but she's a by-the-gods real space ship, so you're now real-live Spacers," he said.

"Thank you, sir," we said together.

He waved a hand at the two pilots as they trudged past and turned into the lift to take them to quarters. "You follow them. The CWO of Quarters will be there to meet you."

We thanked him again, joined the tired spacers in the lift, felt our roiling bellies buck a bit harder as we sped along a railed track in an arc along a girder, suspended in a tiny pressurized booth with ship and space all around. For the first time in my life I thought it possible to actually vomit in space. Neither Alis nor I had ever ridden on such a device, and description was inadequate to convey the sensation. Worse than in a suit with a powerpack during an EVA. We exchanged green-gilled glances and swallowed hard.

The lift settled into its notch in the crew's module, the panel retracted and we followed the pilots into the reception lobby. An old Spacer sat in a power chair behind a small processor station. He nodded silently to the pilots, who nodded back and entered the port directly in front. Alis and I stopped at the processor without being told. It was obvious.

"Alistare penThommasson, spacer-designate, medical services, Class A? And Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, spacer-designate, Class A, junior bridge officer?"

We nodded and once more displayed our identifiers.

"I'm Chief Warrant Officer Rossin penDragon. So you and I must be cousins to some power or the other," he smiled at Ish. "You'll learn soon enough, however, that onboard a ship, no one uses their full name. Call me Ross. You'll be Alis and Ish to everyone except the XO and Captain, and you'd better hope they don't use your full name...you'll be in trouble if you hear them address you directly. But everyone else, feel free to consider them shipmates. The Boson of the Bridge is Riles, a fine woman, top of her field, she'll take you under her wing Ish, so don't worry. And Medical is a cush job, young female, no heavy lifting...", he laughed, "cause we're a .3g ship!" He chuckled at his own joke.

"Your pads are through those door and then to the right. You'll see your names on the door panels and the lock's already programmed to your iris pattern. Just look into the lock eyepiece, like any iris-lock."

"Thank you, sir," we again said together. We laughed at the inadvertent chorus we provided.

"It's Ross!"

"Thanks Ross," I said. "We've both passed the processor orientation tests, of course. But it all seems a bit different when you see it in real-time."

"That it will, lad, that it will. Just stick to the rulebook and listen to your shipmates and you'll both do fine."

We entered the port ahead of us, turned as directed and after following a winding corridor for some distance came upon a door with a panel glowing the name "Alistare penThommasson".

"Must be your pad," I said. We touched cheeks in the old crechemate way. "Good luck."

"You too," she murmured. The port opened when she looked into the eyepiece. "Go well, Ish."

I turned and followed the corridor until I came upon an identical port with my own name glowing on it. The space was exactly like my creche pad on-planet, except much smaller. It didn't matter to me. I owed two work uniforms, a casual-dress blouse and slacks, work booties and dress 'hard' shoes for off-ship; a data-cube networked to my pad's processor terminal; my personal care items, medications and such notions as a new spacer was imagined to require. All of it fit in a couple of drawers and the barely filled a third of the hanging locker. I assumed that after a few years in space I would acquire more.

Chapter One

Damn it! E really does equal MC2!
- Dr. Norman Allsworthy, U of Mars, 3579CE

I Am Born

A great Earth novelist once wrote:"To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night." So I too am forced to take for granted that certain facts about my early years are hidden from my direct knowledge and will remain so forever. I must depend upon the processor records and what others have said. On the score of my childhood, I have little to report, for I was destined for the Ocean of Space and voyaging from age six years onward. So there are many experiences another child might tell you about themselves that I will not possess in my inventory of memory, that warehouse of experience which defines ourselves to ourselves.

I will, however, relate a long life spent voyaging among the many stars of this Galaxy, known to Humans as The Milky Way. As a child I did not know what the name referred to, since I had never seen mammalian milk which had not been processed and sanitized, rendering the liquid a pale straw color, the color of blood plasma, not at all like the brilliant gleaming silver-white highway in space, filled with stars, and many of those stars accompanied by planets, and some of those planets containing rare and valuable goods or materials or services.

To go to Space was to commit one's life to the voyage, like the French fur-traders of old North America. Yes, I know my History, for the Law of Chantilly, where I was born, is strict concerning education, in order to prevent the loss of our Humanity, as has occurred in some other Colonies, despite their claims to the contrary. Although the dissolution of the Empire occurred a thousand PSY (Planetary Standard Years) ago, Earth is still our Home World for us Chantillians. As natives of Earth we are and always will be Human. The fact that Earth's current situation renders it nearly uninhabitable to a Chantillian is irrelevant.

Now I am retired, and health allows me only these few hours at the terminal of my processor. Relating the stories of my many voyages among the stars and planets distracts me from the pain that necessarily accompanies the star-sickness. Even though I knew it was inevitable I would contract it after a hundred star-years of sailing, I continued for another four hundred years.

(The reader keeping in mind that space-years are not equal to Planetary Standard Years. Depending on your reference point, a single space-year could equal several thousand years on any given planet. Such is the price of space-sailing.)

Call it greed, call it denial, call it reckless disregard for my life...I care not what you choose to call it. I spent my life according to my own choosing, at least, according to my own possibilities in a Universe which does not offer all choices to all beings. After all, it is not my fault that Einstein was right and the increasing mass of an object as it approaches the speed of light prohibits translation to post-light speed. I didn't make the laws of physics, I only lived by them.

So, in short, I was born Ishmael O'Connor penDragon, son of Isis O'Connor penIsrael and Arestese Indria penDragon, or so the genetic processor files say, in the Common Era Year 10908.678. I came into the world in the conventional way, that is, the technicians opened my culture vessel when the fetus that was I became able to survive independently in normal interior atmosphere. I do not recall the moment. The trauma of taking that first breath of raw oxygen, carbon dioxide and trace gases has erased that memory. In any event, only scraps of images remain of those first two or three years. My earliest memory is pedaling an exercise machine while a vid showing interstellar views played on my visor. I recall particularly the glowing reds and blues of the Crab Nebulae. Of course, as a child I did not know the images I was seeing were processor-rendered. I recall the deep disappointment of seeing the real thing with normal vision from a viewport in a space-cruiser.

The House of Dragon (pen meaning 'child of') has been one of the Great Traders since our origins on Earth itself, although that is a long time ago, and the data files are mostly unreadable by today's processors; the storage devices themselves inaccessible to us, based as they are on technologies too old to use with today's bio-quantum disseminated processor systems. Nevertheless, our documented history goes back to before the founding of the Chantilly Colony by charter from the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Office, and that is 3500 PSY ago. When the Corporation for Space Development merged into the Earth-Space Directorate in 7897.422CE, the House of Dragon and other Founding Houses petitioned for self-rule, which was granted without demurrer on 7899.598CE. Since that time, our world has been run according to the Founding Contract, as amended.

Since a space-sailor must be trained and educated for that career from an early age, all I experienced while housed in the children's creche was designed to prepare me for that life. Of course, we played the usual creche games, and I imagine my childhood was little different from the reader's, so why detail those events that occur to every child: loss and gain; winning and losing; esteem and shame; courage and cowardice; disappointment and achievement. I cannot claim to have been an exceptional student, nor was I among the plasma-streamers bringing down the class average. At the age of sixteen, I graduated as spacer-designate class A, entitled to ship on small, inter-system, nuclear-electric/solar-generator schooners without the big solar wind and cosmic energy-current sails of the big trans-system galleons and ships-of-the-line, ships capable of ten-percent light speed and thus generally called 'tenners'. Within fourteen Chantillian days I was ordered to report to the Odysseus.